In article <92726035249.MIN-LZVAa26691.bionet-news at uk.ac.daresbury> you write:
: Fellow BioNet Telecommunicators:
:: [...]
: Perhaps there are parallel mailing lists in the equivalent genetics
: newsletters for soybeans, barley, tomato....to think of newsletters
: that I personally have seen. Whether one favors bionet.maize,
: bionet.plants.maize or bionet.plants as a forum, do you think you ought
: to become an cyber-activist in your chosen plant-related discipline
: and encourage colleagues to tune into the bionet discussions groups,
: especially (at least) bionet.plants?
One of the most important things I hoped we could achieve with
bionet.plants is using it as a forum to make each other aware of what
else is going on in the electromic plant biology world.
So far I've got Adolf Ceska to send BEN to bionet plants and bring it
to a wider audience, and I would like to see wider distribution of
other interesting email relating to plant biology.
Jonathan Marder also promised to send things from PHOTOSYN, but I've
not seen anything appear yet.
One of the issues we discussed before creating bionet.plants was the
intention of sub-dividing it as the need arises for 'specialised'
topics. I want to see a bionet.plants hierarchy like bionet.molbio and
I'm particularly keen to bring together people from different groups in
a cooperative way.
I said on bionet.general that I thought bionet.plants.maize was a good
idea if the traffic warrants it and the same is true of any other topic
in plant biology. We voted to create bionet.plants when there was no
general plant.biology forum except bionet.agroforestry and a reasonable
consensus at the time was that we should sub-divide the group when the
need arose.
I (also) said, I don't think the name of a group really matters that
much (I proposed bionet.botany originally) but I think a
bionet.plants.* hierarchy (cf. bionet.molbio) has some merit in helping
potential readers find dicussions relating to plant biology.
What I hate most (and I am about to do it!) is cross-posting messages
to different groups and finding that I'm reading/replying to the same
message in different places. What I find slightly surprising is that
bionet only really wakes up when we start to discuss network politics,
voting procedures and (red face) unsubscription problems %-}
Maybe we should vote on renaming bionet.plants bionet.maize ;-)
Tony.
--
Dr. A.J.Travis, | Tony Travis
Rowett Research Institute, | JANET: <ajt at uk.ac.sari.rri>
Greenburn Road, Bucksburn, | other: <ajt at rri.sari.ac.uk>
Aberdeen, AB2 9SB. UK. | phone: 0224-712751